TITLE:
Personality Assessment Inventory’s Utility in Pre-Treatment Assessment for Violent Offenders
AUTHORS:
Randall Nedegaard, Travis Cronin
KEYWORDS:
Intimate Partner Violence, Psychological Assessment, Perpetrator Treatment, Personality Assessment Inventory
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.9 No.6,
June
22,
2021
ABSTRACT: Domestic Violence programs are often mandated to treat perpetrators of intimate
partner violence (IPV), yet ways to improve the effectiveness of these programs
are needed. One possibility is to provide a more comprehensive assessment and
screening so that group facilitators can be better prepared to serve their
clientele from the very beginning of treatment. To that end, the Personality
Assessment Inventory (PAI) was administered to 154 IPV perpetrators as part of
pre-treatment assessment for group treatment programs. After the treatment
groups were finished, Interviews were conducted with group facilitators to determine
if the facilitators of groups for men who engage in IPV perceived the PAI as an
effective pre-treatment assessment tool. The majority of the program
facilitators believed the PAI to be a useful tool and discussed various ways
they were able to use the results in a positive manner. Those who did not find
it useful were likely not to take the time to use the PAI at all, indicating
there was not enough time because of the arduous nature of the job. The PAI
protocols collected from program participants are also presented and compared
to those currently published in the literature for this population. PAI
profiles for this group differed from the comparison groups in two ways. Within
the clinical scales, this group scored higher than the community norms and the
published norms for men engaging in IPV on negative relations, antisocial
behaviors and alcohol problems. On the validity scales, they had a
significantly higher number of invalid profiles, mainly due to higher levels of
positive impression management.